Pagan anti-defamation network
Affiliated to SAFF
October 05
Latest investigative data proves established religion is the real origin for society's troubles.
Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies
The ancient claim that observance to a religion is the antidote for society’s ills is utterly counterfeit.
PAN has been telling you these ‘home-truths’ for many years but now extensive new scientific study has emphatically proven that Religion is causing the problems in society that it pretends to repair.
'Religious belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide. ....belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems. '... The Times (sept 27, 2005)
These vital findings totally invalidate the generally accepted effects of religiosity. The scrupulous research which compared figures from sectarian and secular countries around the globe was undertaken by social scientist Gregory S. Paul and published in the academically widely respected Journal of Religion & Society. Gregory S Paul found out that community problems such as murder, premature mortality, the occurrence of sexually transmitted diseases, adolescent pregnancy and abortion were up to 300 times elevated in countries whose morals and traditions were motivated by ‘religious’ models than in secular nations wherein motives were based on reasonable, common-wisdom.
The research concludes:
'The widely held fear that a godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted.'
After studying this groundbreaking literature can one now perhaps conclude that science just made ‘God’ an outdated concept?
This link gives the full Gregory S Paul report:
http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html
Regardless of any of the usual old bleatings about finding solutions for crime and communal deviance in our society, politicians will certainly not succeed in curing these problems whilst they are constrained by the pompous religious ethics they invariably pay adherence to. In reality, the shocking conclusion from this account is that it is the politicians themselves who are creating society's troubles by adhering to the desires of orthodox religious activists.
What this cutting-edge research in actuality means is that the deluge of dysfunction and misery which is of course thoroughly portrayed in the British sensationalist media every single day, will never be rectified until there is a proper severance between state and church. Without doubt the Church of England should be disestablished immediately and all the prominent power structures it has taken unto itself by claiming that it had a moral solution to society's problems should be dismantled; when that is achieved our politicians will be freer to make decisions based on common-sense and the authority of Religion has been set aside the people of the U.K. can benefit, like the peoples of Norway, Japan, Sweden et al from an enhanced and more contented life style based not on religious ideals but on progressive humanitarianism. The findings in Gregory S. Paul’s research support the investigations we here at the PAN have completed over numerous years and we applaud him for his first-rate efforts; there are however some central observations we wish to include in order to further enlighten other Pagans/occultists and indeed any interested member of the public.
PAN as you may know is affiliated to SAFF. Some fifteen years ago the SAFF recognized a fundamentalist tactic to assault scientific research at its roots. The fundamentalists correctly saw that it was science, not some imaginary pan-global satanic plot, which was destroying the stranglehold that religion held on the masses.
School children were being educated that scientific materialism was an accepted element of the school curriculum and the academic world had all but dismantled the deity with its discoveries in physics. The antiquated tales in the bible were rationalised for what they were, paranoid and fearful visions caused by early man's lack of knowledge of his environment. Religious orthodoxy could do only at best agree that the enraged and malicious biblical legends were metaphors containing spiritual insights whose meaning were still somehow applicable to today’s society.
Recall too that in the Renaissance the holy Christian orthodoxy maltreated scientists and materialist philosophers as Godless heretics and regained control through thumbscrews, the whip and the blazing stake; the Church-orientated holocaust against freethinkers, in sadly now a part of our history. Nevertheless, since the 18th Century the recognized churches, e.g. Anglican, Catholic, and Methodists had come to an understanding of influence with the establishment of science and had been mostly emasculated. They had transformed into 'Apologists' for the bible. Afterwards, other more severe Protestant sects such as the Baptists and Pentecostals decided that to accomplish their obligations to their God science had to be fully confronted and finally overwhelmed.
These more radical factions saw that, to them, the most hazardous teaching of science was of course held by Darwin’s Theory of Evolution since it packed together all logical explanations of how we came to be and consequently entirely conflicted with biblical tradition.
This was exactly how the Fundie machine began its campaign of attrition against academic circles, infiltrating universities to question and destabilise existing teaching; setting up opposing biblical colleges, pressing for religion to be presented as factual material in schools, to allow them to revoke any scientific materialistic teachings, and getting their greatest minds to represent the proposal of Creationism, the preposterous notion that God made the world and everything in it in a quickie period of seven days as a hypothesis which had the same legitimacy as The Theory of Evolution.
Creation theory was taught together with Evolution as a legitimate alternative in Bible State schools where intolerant educationalists pressed their private religious beliefs at the expense of the edification of their young. You may perhaps have seen the latest court cases where autonomous educationalists tried to get a judgment to ban the counterfeit science of Creationism from being taught in schools. By this time the fundies had gathered together serious support in the figure of George Bush who when questioned stated that he thought there was nothing wrong in Creationism, he was a firm believer in this religious theory.
By now it was clear to intellectual society that there was a serious conflict going on and they were losing quite a lot of ground. The usual provocation from the more vocal religious activists has created the trouble, ensuing in a violation of the anxious concord between religion and science. The world of science has now at long last started to actually do the job it always should have done which is to dispute the power hold of established churches/religions face-to-face.
For far too long they have been attacking New Age beliefs whilst ignoring the very same activities in the orthodox religions for fear of upsetting their comfortable agreement.
The whole situation is now and always was about ‘Mind Control’ - control of YOUR mind.
In the U.S. when the scientific community grumbled about the completely half-baked claims of the Creationist-supporters their reaction was that they had indeed undertaken scientific research with an investigation which showed that the majority of people believed God had made the earth in seven days than believed that we evolved from monkeys. The bizarre logic of Creationists appears in this instance to be that if most people know a thing to be true then it must be reality! This gives us yet more evidence of the type of mind control alluded to above. Nonetheless, the scientists who produced this astonishing report have missed the point to some extent by sidestepping the really controversial implications of it.
It is not 'Religion' as such which is answerable for damaging western societies - the only religious system which has had powerful rule over this society for the past two thousand years is of course Christianity.
This vital investigation proves that every organised religion by qualification must adversely influence its adherents, but the one plainly responsible for doing it throughout Europe and the New World is Christianity.
In like fashion, the holy writ of Islam has affected the other half of the planet for many centuries. That is the unpleasant conclusion this account brings to us.
PAN fully concurs that all reasonable persons within both Christianity and Islam try to work mutually and agreeably under the design of Inter-Faith relations, however no matter how many lovely people there are in both these faith systems they will never manage to conquer the wicked and self-centred temperament of underlying fundamentalism.
A dangerous minority of people is all it takes to obliterate the greatest efforts of everyone else by misconstruing Holy Writ. PAN has always maintained that the notion of creating a Multi-Faith society was a smokescreen due to the unequal power held by the Church of England. We have been accused of being overtly pessimistic - nonetheless recently the Church of England insisted on its dominance by redefining the boundaries. Their broadside at Islam was the controversial public statement that 'Britain is not a multi-faith community - it is a Multi-Cultural community'. That was obviously a plain warning that the people who control Christianity see it as possessing priority and having certain liberties above and beyond any other religious system in the U.K. Rights that they have no intention of surrendering to anyone at any time.
This recent research shows unmistakably what PAN has been saying for years, that the root cause of the majority of world problems is thanks to the imposition of Absolutist religions all the way through history up until present day. Any private belief in spiritual things is not that which causes wickedness; it is the irrational and almost unfeasible demands which the accepted churches set upon their congregations. It is the evil and irrational fears which the orthodox religious faith systems unfortunately instil into the mindsets of the populace at a highly vulnerable age. The culpability, narrow-mindedness and the disinclination to allow any other form of spiritual conviction to co-exist on an equivalent footing teaches people how to have detestation for others who are simply unlike themselves. We see the same suspicions and distrust in the natures of the racist mind - and they are a very real danger to us all!
Holding a belief in spiritual concepts is part and parcel of our deepest human condition.
Please note that PAN is in no way attacking people's selected beliefs. It is a condemnation 'only' of Orthodox Religion.
Orthodox Religion is a detrimental bloodsucker which clings like a hungry leech to the malleable underbelly of contemporary democracy. Like a deadly yet frequently unseen parasite it devours the very life fluids out of it because the clergy who guide it are futile, ineffectual and clearly trying to maintain the unsupportable.
Our society needs to evolve not sink back into a time of suspicion, intolerance and ignorance.
Fundamentalism in all its guises is the real danger to society.
Disclaimer:
PAN realises that the vast majority of Christians are not fundamentalist or evangelical in make up and we only criticise religious extremists who seek to disenfranchise other faiths whilst bolstering their own. PAN does not in any way condone violence against any persons or property and we must state that we have always worked towards a more tolerant and equal society.